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Urge: Naked World
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Urge
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Bob Howley, 43, is watching his daughter Kathleen, a brunet 8-year-old dressed in blue tights and a flowered shirt. Kathleen is intent on something, but it isn't clear what. She is proceeding in a tight circle, slowly pumping her legs like a Lipizzaner on parade. Someone on the soundstage is blaming the Centers for Disease Control for poisoning our children. Kathleen is far away, in the land of strong horses.

Her dad watches, but does not understand. "It's very odd," he brings himself to say. Kathleen seemed normal before she got pneumonia at age 2. When she came home from the hospital, something had changed. At age 3 she was diagnosed as autistic. Since then she's been in a world of her own.

Locked away on psychiatric wards, thought to be unreachable and unteachable, autistic people like Kathleen didn't pose much of a dilemma for society until recently. That has changed in the past several years, as children newly diagnosed as autistic have swamped special education programs around the country.

The number of kids and teenagers labeled autistic rose from 23,000 in 1994 to 54,000 last year, an astonishing leap that suggests something in American life is driving a lot of children crazy. Whether or not those numbers reflect an epidemic or better accounting, they have helped generate a pointed debate about public health in general and the risks of vaccination in particular.

Autism is a range of disorders that share in common an inability to relate to other people. Many autistic people never talk. Others manage to learn rote phrases. Many have odd behaviors, lining up their toys in a precise unfathomable order, compulsively wriggling their fingers. Some feel no pain when they smash their heads into the sidewalk. Some wander into traffic.

For the most part, the origins of autism remain a mystery. The most that can be said is what is said about all chronic ailments -- that it's a mixture of genes and environment. Most parents are baffled by the disorder, which sometimes is evident practically at birth, and other times kicks in in the second year or later.

"It's an enigma," says Howley, an actuary in Maplewood, N.J. "They think there's a genetic basis of it, then other things. It could have been viruses. Or antibiotics. There are so many theories."

It's equally hard to be sure how much autism is really growing. Changing diagnostic criteria, the latest in 1994, have expanded the diagnosis to include kids with milder problems. The 1990 Americans with Disability Act mandated education for these children, ensuring that they are counted and monitored. The Internet brings parents together, raising their convictions and clout.

Many parents at last Saturday's rally, backed by a powerful right-wing congressman and a smattering of research, believe they have found the culprit for as many as half of the autism cases. The guilty party, they believe, is the vaccine.

Next page | A rash of conflicting studies